Negotiations For A Cover Artist

It helps to be a comic book fan and to follow links on DeviantArt to those artists who take commissions... ;-)

Welcome To Post #100.

And for this post I would like to ask a few things of my fine upstanding blog readers:

1) Do any of you know a good graphic artist/comic book illustrator I can commission for creating an ebook cover?  Seriously.  Email me p.warten@gmail.com.

2) Can you all get 50,000 people to buy my ebook Last of the Grapefruit Wars or the Nook-exclusive estory "Welcome To Florida"?  (my latest estory "The Hero Cleanup Protocol" is going through some evaluation at the moment...)

3) Can you help a fellow librarian who's down on his luck?  HIRE ME!!!  (Waaaaaaaaah) (runs toward the horizon)

New eStory: The Hero Cleanup Protocol

by. Paul Wartenberg
cover by.  Paul Wartenberg, 'cause I'm waiting on word from Adam Withers if he's available to draw a cover for me... ;-)

The story is an idea I'd been bumping about for ages: my own little superhero reality where it's a world where Superheroes exist... but because they didn't know they classified as supers, by the time they could do anything about it (the Sixties) all the superhero names were claimed by the comic book industry.  So they have to go with fake "real names" like Charlie or Vicky... except for the rare few who can afford to pay a name squatter the rights to those names.  This is also a world where Superheroes have to be registered: either work under legal guidelines for the U.S. Marshals or the military (where supersoldiers rarely worked out well...), or "retire".  The mechanics of the world is that 1) anyone can be a hero: there's no defining DNA or chromosomal trait or mutating process; 2) most super powers are basic such as improved agility, speed, and flight... but that's usually it, there are few advanced powers like firestarting, telekinesis, or scrying; 3) the powers are mental in nature, not physical, even the powers of strength and invulnerability; 4) Most supers don't even know they have powers because they're rarely in a situation to employ them; and 5) there are few true Superhumans or God-like beings: most are mortal humans (there's one or two notable exceptions, and they're terrifying...).

In this world, there's (supposedly) one potential superhuman per 500,000 people.  Most supers organize into teams per city/metro, dedicated to stuff like bounty hunting, emergency response to disasters, and public relations (they're treated like sports athletes and celebrities: the third thing you get when you become a Registered Super - AKA Talent because "Super" had been trademarked - is your own playable trading card).  And in this world, every wannabe hero goes through rigorous training with the FBI and Marshals offices at Quantico.  They also go through rigorous psych evals, because the last thing anyone wants on their team is a superhero ready to snap at any second.

My story is about what happens when a new hero arrival snaps on his first day.  That's the Cleanup Protocol.  And it's my introduce to the key character of my superhero universe: Powersurge, the exception to all the rules I made...

It's been uploaded into Smashwords, made available for various ereader services.  I think it has a converted format for Kindle as well, which is a bit surprising because I thought Kindle was still using an exclusive format...

This was part of my Local Authors event presentation: I wanted to demonstrate the relative ease of getting a story uploaded straight from Word document format into an epublishing market.

The tricky part now is, obviously, how to get 50,000 people to buy that estory... ;-)

Local Authors Event: Tarpon Springs April 5th

I will be at the Tarpon Springs Public Library today to promote my book Last of the Grapefruit Wars, my eshort story "Welcome To Florida", and possibly see about posting a new eshort through Smashwords to demonstrate how that might work.  No guarantees though.

Enjoy the Issue 20 updating to City of Heroes!

This Is A Month Of Blogging

I might not succeed.

Andy from Ta-Nehisi's Open Threads mentioned that April is supposed to be a month of daily blogging, a means of getting bloggers more active in the actual act of blogging.  You see, outside of the professionals who are paid to blog as a means of reporting, most amateur bloggers are... inconsistent.  Sometimes not even blogging for months on end.  When that happens, people who might read that blog tune out, traffic decreases, the possibility of getting your words seen and recognized fades.

So, to blog each day.

Like I said, I might not succeed.

At least not here.

I do have another blog, one where I am more active: my political blogsite The Amendments We Need, although it's been awhile since I've posted any amendment ideas...  The deal with that one is, well, it's more biased, and little bit angrier, and a lot more profane (kids, cover your eyes).  It doesn't have much to do with my writing interests and my librarianship profession, which I separated to this blog here.  Thanks for visiting, by the way.

What I may try to do is blog alternately, once here, once there.  But again, this is a busy month for me, and there's about 20 other real-life things I got to be doing around here.

So I might not succeed.

Check with me by April 30th.

The St. Patrick's "Everyone Pretends They're Irish So They Can Get Drunk" Obligatory Thread

It's that time of year again to break out the green socks!




You know how hard it is to find an anime of Belldandy with a U2 soundtrack to it?



Anyway, enjoy St. Patricks Day and stay safe!

Personal News: About My Cat Page

Page the Silly Kitty, I call her.

I adopted Page thanks to the help of an old workplace friend Judi (she's now helping with the Cat Rescue group in Broward County) back in 2001.  So she's roughly 10 years old this year.

Sad thing is, I found a lump on her side a few months.  Finally got her into the vet's, hoping that it was just an inflammation from the booster shots she got back in November...

It wasn't.  It came back as a kind of carcinoma.  A cancer.  And it was growing past the skin and bits of muscle that the vet had cut out.  Meaning we probably didn't get all of it.

She's suffering through the humiliation of the cone collar this past week, and my older cat Tehya is throwing more of a hissy fit that usual at Page (vet says it's because Tehya can smell something different about Page).  She doesn't seem to understand why I'm whispering to her more than usual, at most all she's hoping for is the day I get that cone off her neck...

Hug your kitties when you can.

Our pets never live as long as we want them to.